television

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Late at night I’ll often tune into BBC4 because it offers an intravenous nostalgia hit for old geysers like me whose passion for music started with Love Me Do and kind of waned after the stunning Nirvana. But one guy’s influence from the late 70’s passed me by until relatively recently, the punk poet John Cooper Clarke. Then tonight whilst browsing for something – anything – decent to watch and I switched on the channel, more in hope than expectation, to find a brilliant study on his life’s work and his influence.

I had some knowledge of his name deep in my memory banks but up until I’d watched the final series of American tv’s greatest export, The Sopranos, I’d never come across his work. They refer to him now as the Salford Bard and a national treasure but back in the day he was an angry northern performance poet, painfully stick thin with a shock of Dylan-like hair.

Now poetry’s not something I’m particularly into but I understand he could silence a wild pogoing crowd with his rapid-fire delivery of cleverly-crafted rhymes, earthy themes and even earthier language. There’s one piece he wrote called ‘Evidently Chickentown’ which, first time I heard it, shook me with its strong relentless language and the sense of sheer futility in the lyrics. Backed by a haunting soundtrack it’s a very bleak piece. And I came across it during the final scenes to the Sopranos episode entitled Stage 5, which for me is the defining 60 minutes in the whole saga because it has the storyline which signals the final outcome. Even if you’ve never seen a moment of the New Joisey crime family story, just appreciate the bitter regret in the words of character Phil Leotardo as he swears revenge against Tony for his brother’s killing, and all this made more intense by the brutality of Clarke’s ode to Chickentown. It’s poetry alright Jim but there are no wandering, lonely clouds in this piece. But it remains a masterpiece.

Paul

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Two years ago this week a story broke which shocked the world of showbiz and led to the biggest falling out since Simon and Garfunkel decided their personal troubled waters were unbridgeable. Sensing the hurt of the latest fall out I felt the need to commit a few words to my blog at the time, reflecting on the end of the bromance. So far as I know time hasn’t healed the rift…

Ah look at these two old mates. One’s a rather annoying little fellah with a rather shallow personality, squeaky voice, a magic wand, and a fluffy partner who struggles to talk coherently. And the other’s Sooty. Boom boom.

Sadly that friendship was tested yesterday with the news that the diminutive magician Paul Daniels was hospitalised after being hit in the face by a pizza flung by kiddies’ favourite Sooty. You couldn’t make it up could you? I’m not sure whether Paul intends to press charges for GBH (Giardiniera Bashes Head no doubt) but don’t you think, whatever the supposed injury, this is one story that he shouldn’t have sought to publicise. I mean how tough does this make him look? Getting his publicist to put out a release stating that he sought medical care after being attacked by a quatro stagioni flung by a glove puppet isn’t exactly the most glorious example of conspicuous bravery is it? I can’t see him appearing in the next New Year’s Honours list nor HRH awarding him the George medal for valour in the face of Sweep’s little friend.

What a Marguerita.

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Here’s a piece written by the fine journalist Tom Sutcliffe in the Independent newspaper on the 22 June following the shocking news that the actor James Gandolfini, best known for playing the role of Tony Soprano, had died at the age of just 51. I tried to do a similar piece but this was far more poignant….

In a strange way we’ve rehearsed for this moment. For a lot of James Gandolfini’s fans the first instinct on hearing that he’d died in mid-career was to go back to an earlier ending, the very last scene of The Sopranos.

Tellingly it wasn’t a neat resolution but an abrupt caesura. The life of that series – so vital, engrossing and richly unpredictable – didn’t conclude (a word that has too much calculation in it). It simply stopped, cutting to black in mid-phrase. And it left behind it a pang very similar to that which a lot of us felt when we heard the news of Gandolfini’s death.

Brilliance had been truncated, and though in that case we knew precisely what was coming, we had no idea that we would be left with nothing but memories. “Try to focus on the times that were good,” AJ had said to Tony a few minutes earlier.

It was the kind of thing you say at a funeral, as if the series itself was offering condolences for our loss. And now we were feeling that sorrow all over again, at a different pitch. At Holstens, the diner where that great ending was filmed, someone put out a Reserved sign on the booth where the Sopranos sat for their last supper, in Gandolfini’s honor.

Is it the actor or the character we’re mourning? For those lucky enough to work with him there was no question that it was Gandolfini who was missed. Social networks and blogs filled up with tributes not just to his skill as an actor but also to his warmth as a human being, the modesty and generosity with which he assumed and carried his fame. But for those who only knew him on screen, and overwhelmingly through his role as Tony Soprano, I think it’s that character we’re grieving for a bit as well. The catch being that Gandolfini’s greatness as a screen actor was to intermingle self and fiction inextricably, so that it felt as if his New Jersey mobster really lived and felt.

In interviews Gandolfini expressed his admiration for Mickey Rourke above all. He respected the other screen greats of his generation but it was Rourke he really wanted to emulate as a young actor starting out. And in that I think he’d grasped a quality of vulnerability and self-exposure in his own talent, which was what transformed Tony Soprano from genre brute into a kind of everyman. He might have been a monster but he was also his own victim.

He was charming too. Other people had done volatile mobsters before. Think of Robert de Niro as Al Capone in The Untouchables, suddenly unleashing his rage against an underling. Or Joe Pesci shooting the waiter in Goodfellas. But the difference with those explosions was that you never trusted the characters again. It didn’t matter how charismatic they were or how solid their bonhomie felt. You felt only anxiety when they were on screen.

Tony Soprano was different. You never doubted that he could kill without compunction — and the series regularly reminded you of that fact. He wasn’t in therapy because he was conscience-stricken; he went because he wasn’t satisfied with what his life gave him any more. But Gandolfini made it possible for you to like Tony too, to understand why people were drawn to him.

After every atrocity you worked at getting to like him again. That’s because there wasn’t a shade of judgement in the performance, only a sympathy for the messy, disappointing business of trying to make life work. It’s why Gandolfini had no problem at all in shedding the mobster when he played the doveish general in In The Loop.

Watch him play the scene in that film where he locks antlers with Malcolm Tucker and both men trade threats of violence: you don’t for a moment think of Tony, only that this is a man who could win the fight but doesn’t really want it to start.

It’s genuinely sad to think that we’ll never see Gandolfi lose his temper again. Even sadder to think we won’t see him recapture it, and give that low chuckle at the absurdity of the world.